FEATURE:
My Five Favourite Albums of 2021
Wolf Alice – Blue Weekend
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ALL of my favourite five albums…
from this year have been made by British artists. I had Billie Eilish’s (who is American) Happier Than Ever in the top ten, though it is an all-British top five. I know we are not at the end of the year yet, but I was struck by Wolf Alice’s Blue Weekend. I reviewed a track from it, The Last Man on Earth, earlier in the year. I was blown away by it! Although I had listened to the previous two albums from the London-based band, Blue Weekend was one where I really sat down and listened hard. Released on 4th June, I would advise people to buy the album. This year has been such a strong one for music. Although most of my favourite albums are from solo artists, Wolf Alice are a band who are hitting their stride. Blue Weekend is their most rounded and incredible album to date (and it was also nominated for the Mercury Prize earlier in he year). Led by the awesome Ellie Rowsell, Blue Weekend is an astonishing album! Before coming to a couple of reviews for Blue Weekend, there are a couple of interviews that give us some background and context. For Women in Pop, Rowsell discussed how the creative process has changed for the band:
“Hi Ellie. So lovely to speak with you. Can I just congratulate you on Blue Weekend? It’s so beautiful. The sound is still very distinctively Wolf Alice but it's also strengthened and softened at the same time on this album. What were your initial desires behind this creature as a whole?
I don't really know if I had an incentive or anything, you know? Because with this album, we didn't go away and ‘write it’. it was just more that eventually we had enough songs to be like ‘okay let's put together an album’. Someone told me the other day that they had asked me what do you want to do after Visions of a Life and I had said ‘I want to write a really fun album’. So I must have at one point had an idea of what I wanted to do but it never works out like that. The songs just come to you rather than you decide to make a certain concept.
On that can you talk me through the creative and recording process for the album?
When we came off tour for Visions of a Life, we had been touring for a few years. I remember coming off tour and being ‘shit i haven't written any songs’. And I didn't even really want to write any songs because I really just wanted a break from music. After about six months off, I was like ‘shit, we really need to think about what we're going to do next’. So we booked an Airbnb and just went away together, no pressure, just to see if we write anything. I actually had a couple of demos but I was afraid of showing people something that was worse than what we'd already put out, do you know what I mean? It was a confidence thing, I just said to myself I don't have anything. But it was really nice because the guys were like ‘these are really good’ and we figured out that we did have some stuff and that we weren't going to have to completely start with nothing. So we built upon those demos until we felt ready to go away and record with a producer.
On that note, your lyrics are incredible. I feel they're standalone prose, they walk this fine line between being very personal to you while at the same time being quite broad so the listener doesn't feel like they're watching in. They can reflect it themselves which is a tricky thing to do. When it comes to writing, have you always leaned towards the poetry or the melody first?
It's not poetry that I lean to but it's just the words. Poetry is so different from lyrics even though you would think that it would be quite similar, it's really not. I've tried poetry and it's just a real different ballgame. The thing that I always feel proud of if I’ve done a good job is the words. maybe because i find it really hard as well. So for me it comes first.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jordan Hemingway
Where do you think the power of music lies? Is it in that melody or is it in the sentiment? Is it in the words? Or for you, is it a combination of both?
There's no right answer to that. Obviously the music that connects the most is going to be one that puts equal effort into both. There are songs that don't have any words that make me feel something and there are songs where the words without the music are going to make me feel the most There are songs that we've written before where I’m like I love this, the music is great, but the lyrics aren’t great or the other way around. It's really hard to always get both to a level that you are satisfied with. You are super lucky if you are happy with both.
How do you feel you've changed or grown both as an artist and as a collective band, but also as a song writer across your three albums?
This album for me, I just wrote things that I knew because I enjoyed it rather than trying to write things that I felt was expected of me or, it's ridiculous to say, trying to be cool. I really wrote things that I knew that I would enjoy playing or singing. I always quote this thing that [singer and producer] St Vincent said, you spend your whole life trying to outdo yourself in song writing and trying to be clever and write something that no one's written before or won't expect of you and then eventually you just want to write songs that will be the songs that will be your favourite songs. Songs that are played at people's weddings or funerals and stuff like that. When I was younger I would try to avoid writing songs like that, and it is actually now what i quite enjoy doing. Simple things that I felt were embarrassing to write before, now I don't really care. Basically I’m not embarrassed anymore. I just do what I enjoy without being embarrassed”.
That need to move on and do something different was reinforced when the band chatted with Under the Radar. A step on from their previous album, 2017’s Visions of a Life, what we hear is a band renewed and reborn. Blue Weekend is an inspired album:
“We got to a point when we were a bit sick of everything we were doing,” frontwoman Ellie Rowsell explains. “We needed to go away and remember who we were as individuals. You know, living out of suitcases and having destroyed all our other relationships, it was important to go back and sort that shit out.” Some six months later, they reconvened at a rehearsal studio complex in north London—“a hollowed-out shipping container” in the words of bassist Theo Ellis—during the summer of 2019 to begin work on what would become their third album: Blue Weekend.
We’re speaking in the middle of February as Wolf Alice are preparing to announce their comeback, with the campaign so fresh that the band members are not even entirely sure when the album is coming out. Ellis jokes that it feels as though the album was finally finished just two days ago. “It’s like Chinese Democracy this album,” he adds, referring to the long gestation of Guns N’ Roses’ 2008 album.
As with much of the music of 2021, Blue Weekend was put together under the cloud of COVID-19, with delays and restrictions prolonging the recording process. The band members found themselves working in Brussels as the world ground to a halt during the first weeks of the pandemic, bringing an added intensity to the sessions. “There was nothing to take your mind off it,” guitarist Joff Oddie says, to which Ellis agrees. “The studio itself is residential and all encompassing—you eat there, you do everything there—so you’re already in a kind of isolation,” he says. “You’ve created that form of isolation because that’s what you seek out to try to focus on the record. So there’s a weird thing where you’re already in that space and then suddenly the whole world is there too.”
Like its predecessor, Blue Weekend pays little attention to the idea that a band should have a signature sound, as it veers from bratty punk ragers (“Play the Greatest Hits”) to festival-ready anthems (“How Can I Make It OK?”) and grand ballads (“The Last Man on Earth”). Yet this time, the eclecticism feels more natural and refined. “I feel like on previous Wolf Alice albums, people have always struggled to join up the dots between some songs,” Ellis says. “That’s maybe because we’re not necessarily a band that has set out to sound like a communal favorite band of ours in the first place.”
Instead, the four-piece work towards making music that matches the emotional needs of Rowsell’s writing—which has grown more personal and direct, building on the tenderness of their most popular singles. “I always protect myself maybe by putting a certain ambiguity onto everything,” Rowsell admits. “I tried to do that less because I’d seen other people do it and really admired it in some ways.”
That does not mean though that Blue Weekend is a completely open book. There is still an air of mystery around these songs, which reveal themselves slowly and have a stormy, elemental atmosphere. And there is room too for a little ambiguity, not least with the album’s title—which remains an unsolved puzzle for the band themselves. “We came about it because we were in a cab and I said to Joel [Amey, drummer] and Theo: ‘Next blue weekend we should go to the forest which is on the outskirts of Brussels,’” Rowsell says. “And Joel was like ‘blue weekend…that’s an album name’... I still don’t know if a blue weekend is a good one or a bad one.” That’s when Amey cuts in: “I think Belgium went into lockdown one day later…”.
The first review for Blue Weekend that I want to introduce is from The Guardian. It seems that the pandemic and its limitations forced something bigger from the band:
“On the face of it, they seem like a very 2020s kind of band, built for a pop world in which relatability and mild aspiration is more important than glamour and the selling of dreams. For all the attention from Vogue – “Here’s How An It Brit Does Glastonbury Style” – Rowsell seems noticeably more “older sister’s famously cool mate” than “rock star blessed with otherworldly charisma”. Her lyrics tend to deal in the everyday frustrations of twentysomething life; whether in character or not, it comes as a mild shock to hear her singing about accepting any drugs she’s offered in Los Angeles on Blue Weekend’s Delicious Things.
Nor are they a band who have bought into time-honoured rock mythology suggesting a life more glamorous, weird, transgressive and exciting than your own. The 2017 tour documentary On the Road made being in Wolf Alice look like a job, a monotonous, gruelling round of faintly underwhelming experiences that director Michael Winterbottom compared to “a horrific form of camping”. Equally, their most obvious musical references points – shoegazing and grunge, a touch of Elastica about their punkier moments – largely date from the early 90s. Their influences are deftly applied, but audible enough to attract an audience who recall this stuff first time around. There’s something there for the 16-year-olds and the BBC Radio 6 Music listeners who remember when the O2 Forum was called the Town and Country Club.
It’s a recipe for a certain level of success, but Blue Weekend is fairly obviously a lunge for something bigger. The producer’s chair is occupied by Markus Dravs, whose CV – Coldplay, Arcade Fire, Florence + the Machine – suggests that he’s very much the kind of guy you phone if you find your ambitions extending a little further than your present status. It’s a move compounded by circumstance: trapped in a residential recording studio by the Covid pandemic, the band opted to spend their time polishing an album they had previously thought was virtually finished”.
To finish off, I wanted to quote DIY’s review for Blue Weekend. They noted how confident the band sound right throughout their third studio album (which is something that struck me when listening to it):
“It’s easy to shower superlatives on a band you’re really rooting for. When Wolf Alice’s 2015 debut ‘My Love Is Cool’ landed, its impressive breadth and fizzing, excitable energy prompted all kinds of ‘best new group’ mutterings; when 2017’s ‘Visions of a Life’ won the Mercury Prize, the industry gave it a definitive crowning itself. But with their third album, the London quartet have made something so undeniably brilliant, it’s impossible not to speak of it in the sort of lofty terms only reserved for the truly top tier: ‘Blue Weekend’ isn’t just Wolf Alice’s best record by a country mile, it’s an album that will be around for a long time - a history book-cementing document of a band at the peak of their powers. If the grand, introductory swell of ‘The Beach’, with its Macbeth-quoting opening line, sets the tone for an album unafraid to lean into the Big Moments, then it’s ‘Delicious Things’ that ups their own bar by several notches. A cheeky tale of finding yourself a long, long way from home, its shuffling basslines and seesawing vocal patterns - half-spoken rhymes that teeter between nervousness and wide-eyed wonder - have no discernible modern reference point; if it’s historically easy for a guitar/bass/drums quartet to fall into obvious lanes, across the record Wolf Alice defiantly create their own.
This is clever, clever songwriting that never takes the obvious path, instead picking confidently between lush, finger-picked acoustics (‘Safe From Heartbreak (if you never fall in love)’), bratty, brilliant thrashes (‘Play The Greatest Hits’) and sultry, spacious drama (‘Feeling Myself’) in the space of the same ten minutes.
It’s this sense of confident, high stakes emotion that rings throughout. Whether in ‘The Last Man on Earth’’s gorgeous, slow-building piano and choral goosebumps or ‘Smile’ - the kind of frustrated outpouring (“I am what I am and I’m good at it/ And you don’t like me well that isn’t fucking relevant”) that a million women will be worshipping at Rowsell’s altar for - ‘Blue Weekend’ is an album that revels in its feelings. The dynamics are constantly shifting, often moving from tender sparsity to luxurious sonic opulence in the same song, but everything feels like the absolute peak of what it could be; the highs soar higher, the riffs are gnarlier and by closer ‘The Beach II’ you’re left with an album that’s audibly chosen never to shy away from any second of potential. Majestic”.
I am going to finish off there. Maybe some of my choices for the best five albums of the year are quite obvious. There were some others that were battling for a spot but, to me, the five are all very different and have their own sound. Finishing off with Wolf Alice’s Blue Weekend, it showcases a very high standard! It just leaves me to wonder…
WHAT 2022 will bring.